Intel fires opening salvo in x86 vs. ARM smartphone wars

At long last, Intel has managed to squeeze x86 into a smartphone package... …

I have been writing about Moorestown since Intel started talking publicly about it in 2007, so the official unveiling of Intel's first x86-based SoC aimed at the smartphone market marks the end of a long journey. Moorestown's appearance also marks the beginning of another journey, as Intel prepares to face down ARM in its quest to win handset and tablet makers over to the x86 camp. In many ways, this is the biggest and most important Intel product launch since the original Atom introduction.

The unveiling isn't a product announcement, so there are no "speeds and feeds" or prices to reveal. Rather, Intel is showing prototypes, making some specific performance and power claims, and announcing that Moorestown will officially be known as the Atom Z6XX series. Because the reveal was about filling in the blanks and confirming previously known or rumored details, I won't spend a lot of time reproducing the specifics of the announcement—you can get that information from the Intel press release, linked at the end of this post.

In this article, I'll do a brief recap of the basics of Moorestown, and then I'll give my own take on some of the specific claims that Intel has made for its first-ever smartphone platform.

A rough map of Moorestown

The image above shows two of the four main parts of the Moorestown platform. At the heart of Moorestown is the application processor, which is an SoC (system on a chip) that features an in-order, Atom-derived x86 CPU core and a PowerVR SGX GPU from Imagination technologies. This application processor, codenamed "Lincroft" and now officially known as the Intel Atom Processor Z6XX, is a 45nm part made on Intel's low-leakage SoC process. This SoC process trades a bit of performance for a reduction in leakage, making the SoC more efficient.

The Langwell Platform Controller Hub (PCH) is made on TSMC's 65nm process using IP blocks from a number of sources. This is the part of the Moorestown platform that TSMC customers will be able to customize to fit their own products. The PCH contains the following main blocks:

Briertown mixed signal IC: this contains a number of functions, including a touchscreen controller and an audio interface, and it also plays a key role in the platform's power management by supporting OS-controlled power gating for the SoC and PCH.

Baseband processor: this is for the actual wireless interface, and it contains DSP hardware as well.

When you include the separate memory chip, which competitors like Apple's A4 have integrated into the SoC package, you're looking at five chips in all for the Moorestown platform. Compare this to Qualcomm's Snapdragon, which integrates most of this functionality, including the baseband processor, into a single package. Moorestown's sprawling five-chip layout will make it less efficient and more expensive than a comparable, more highly integrated ARM solution.

Performance and power: ideal numbers

According to AnandTech (see below), Intel is offering the following battery life figures as typical for a smartphone based on a 1.5GHz Moorestown:

Idle: 21-23 milliwatts (Intel claims 25 milliwatts idle for a 1GHz Snapdragon). This is 10 days of standby time with a 1500mAh battery

All of the above look pretty typical for a smartphone, which is great. But they all have something in common, which I'll point out in a moment.

As for performance, this is where Intel really makes some claims for Moorestown. Anand reports that he saw Quake 3 running on Moorestown at 100FPS. He also reports that Moorestown completed the SunSpider benchmark in a scorching two seconds (compare about 10 seconds for a 1GHz Snapdragon). The SPEC scores that Intel gave for Moorestown versus the competition were equally impressive, and you can check these benchmarks out here.

It's kinda still not really a smartphone platform

If you compare Intel's power consumption numbers to its performance numbers, you'll notice that there's zero overlap. Nowhere does Intel reveal how much power Moorestown draws when running Quake 3 at 100FPS, or when executing the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in two seconds. That's because the power draw in those situations is certain to be astronomic by smartphone standards. In other words, as long as you're doing a bunch of stuff that either doesn't involve the main SoC at all (e.g., talking, idling), or will let you shut down all but a few specialized blocks (e.g., 1080p video playback, audio playback), you can expect to have something approaching a normal smartphone experience. But when you actually use the main SoC like a real x86 processor... well, Intel is silent on those power numbers, and that's almost certainly because they're ugly.

The reason for Moorestown's decidedly unsmartphone-like range of power/performance points is that Intel relied heavily on power gating and other, very fine-grained dynamic power optimization techniques. This means that under ideal conditions, with most of the complex and power-hungry parts of the platform either shut down or severely throttled, the SoC's low leakage means that Moorestown's power profile will look much like that of a more integrated, simpler ARM platform. But as you start turning on and upclocking the parts of the SoC that can deliver the kinds of performance results that Intel touts in its slides, Moorestown's power usage will spike up out of smartphone territory and into the lower reaches of the netbook stratosphere. In other words, you can't get something for nothing, despite the fact that Intel can make it look like you do by selectively pairing some nothing-based power numbers with some something-based performance numbers.

The level of OS involvement needed to manage this very thorough and carefully implemented level of dynamic power management is substantial, and Anand describes some of the effort that went into making the Intel- and Nokia-run MeeGo OS play the hardware like a giant pipe organ. In this respect, Moorestown is a tiny bit like the late Larrabee project, because Moorestown's substantial software component will be critical to making the platform competitive in its initial incarnation. You won't just fire up Ubuntu—or even Chrome OS or Android or an x86 port of webOS—on your Moorestown-based tablet and expect to get any kind of battery life from it. No, making a Moorestown-based product sip power like a smartphone will take a lot of custom, Intel-led effort, and this will constrain the platform's potential applications a bit.

The ironies of it all

Now that the Moorestown picture is more fully fleshed out, there are a few wonderful ironies here.

The first irony is that Intel, the quintessential hardware maker, has had to invest considerably in the software side of the platform in order to make it competitive with the ARM-based competition's simpler, pure hardware offerings. The second irony is that Moorestown's dependence on a heavily optimized software stack will constrain its realistic OS options, at least initially, to MeeGo, despite the fact that desktop x86 can boot just about anything.

The final bit of irony is rooted in the fact that, unlike ARM, Intel is not licensing out its core design to one and all, so Moorestown is still a single-vendor, single-source platform that's competing with designs like the A9 that are available from multiple vendors and foundries. The result is that, in contrast to the ubiquity of commodity x86 in the desktop space, Moorestown turns out to be something of a boutique mobile platform—you might even call it a bit "closed"—that's pitted against the more "open," commodity alternative of the ARM ecosystem. Intel, the desktop commodity hardware vendor, has suddenly become the niche player in mobile.

The upshot of all of the above is that Moorestown is typical of Intel's initial, awkward steps into a brand-new space: the first product isn't really competitive, but Intel uses it to lay the groundwork, learn lessons, and provide grist for the iterative mill. Then, by the time the second or third product comes to market, the kinks are worked out and the platform can compete. This being the case, Intel's first serious smartphone part will be the 32nm Medfield in 2011. Medfield will combine the application processor and PCH onto a single chip, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it sport in-package memory. In all, Medfield will be a real ARM competitor—and then it'll be game on.

I think Intel are going to have to price Moorestown very aggressively to draw people away from ARM and what with all the variants of ARM cores tailored to different manufacturer needs, they will need to offer quite a few options. No R&D department will voluntarily wish to split their range across two instruction sets because ARM is the only option for certain requirements.

I would venture that they are too late. Performance for Watt the will not be able to beat ARM for a long time. And the advantages of using x86 code have fallen significantly with the rise of iPhone OS/ Android. There won't be much code that is not either already available in a ARM version or desirable on one once Intel finally is good enough. If they ever manage it.

Apple didn't switch from PPC (an architecture) to Intel (a company), they switched architectures from PPC to x86. Intel just happens to be the best at x86. Intel was more interested in developing their x86 chips than IBM was in developing their PPC. As architectures, I think you'll find that PPC is very compelling, but if chips based on it are not being developed aggressively as a competitor architecture's chips, then you're stuck. Apple switched because it couldn't get any love from IBM.

I never understood why people would want to run x86 on their mobile phone. The only reason I can think of would be to run x86 applications which are not possible to get on ARM (like Win32 apps). But even if you could do that they would be unusable on a device with a small screen without mouse and keyboard.

I don't get it either. What does this bring to the table that can't already be done with the dominant architecture (ARM?) There are already eleventy billion implementations of ARM (aside from rolling your own) and there isn't any software need for x86 in the smartphone space. So why would anyone choose this? Especially when, as Jon says, power consumption when doing anything remotely interesting is "ugly."

As the entire Android stack is GPL (linux kernel) / Apache (android/dalvik), it should be relatively easy for intel to port their optimization over, no? After all, MeeGo is already a linux kernel with such optimazations.

Intel's looking at the long term here, there's going to be server and there's going to be mobile, the desktop and its variants are going to effectively become marginalized. If they don't do something, they'll lose a large portion of their revenue. ARM is the game now, but we'll have mobile devices for a long long time and that space is going to grow

If you want to run real windows apps on your phone I suggest this test. Set your current Windows machine to the smallest screen resolution possible and then sit far enough back from the screen so it's the equivalent size of a mobile phone. Oh, and you have to control it using only the numerical keyboard.

I think the draw here is that the peak performance is high, and idle performance is comparable. The instruction set isn't going to be a draw, the performance is.

I charge my phone every night, whether it needs it or not. I don't use it much (an hour, maybe two a day), but when I do, I'm cursing the sluggishness that is the iPhone 3G. If I could get incredible performance and still have it last all day for my usage model, I'd be interested.

I think the draw here is that the peak performance is high, and idle performance is comparable. The instruction set isn't going to be a draw, the performance is.

I charge my phone every night, whether it needs it or not. I don't use it much (an hour, maybe two a day), but when I do, I'm cursing the sluggishness that is the iPhone 3G. If I could get incredible performance and still have it last all day for my usage model, I'd be interested.

So get the 3GS. In comparison it's about twice as fast. And the iPhone 4, if it's anything like the iPad, will be four times as fast. Don't blame ARM when you have an older generation underclocked CPU.

The real beauty of Intel getting into the smart phone business is that they'll have a reference design that everyone can use. This will make smart phones more of a commodity item and drive prices down significantly.

If you want to run real windows apps on your phone I suggest this test. Set your current Windows machine to the smallest screen resolution possible and then sit far enough back from the screen so it's the equivalent size of a mobile phone. Oh, and you have to control it using only the numerical keyboard.

This reminds me a bit of the XBox. Microsoft's first one wasn't a huge hit, but they stuck with it and made the XBox360, which has been highly successful. They saw gaming was a huge market they weren't in, and put their financial muscle behind it, staying in there and making v2.

Now they see the huge market that is the growing mobile space - especially smartphones, which are high-margin (compared to "lowly" feature phones at low prices). They want in and are willing to eat it on their first effort if it isn't that successful, as a price of entry, I expect round two will be much more successful, let's see what they do there.

"Wind River has a platform for Android. It incorporates Atom optimizations into Android, hardens the software stack and prepares it for use in Moorestown devices. Google has little incentive to dedicate a lot of support to Moorestown, so Intel had to internalize that."

"I wouldn't be surprised if Apple switched to Intel for mobile platforms as well. " Well, I would, they design their own chips in house now.

The a4 is a standard ARM core with various other standard parts packaged as a custom SoC. Intel has previously offered to allow 3rd parties to make custom SoC's built around the atom core. If they were able to convince apple Medfield was worth it there's not reason apple couldn't build an SoC that had exactly the parts that they wanted in it.

LOL some people actually STILL talk about using Desktop Windows on a phone. Is there a word for an idea that has been proven wrong thousands of times and which people still bring along? Nobody is buying "REAL" Windows on a Tablet PC and you want it on a phone with a 3.5" screen? Yeah sure that would make sense. If the resolution is high enough to make sense the start button would be smaller than a pinhead. So perhaps you can use your phone with a microscope. And a trackball? Seriously. I have news for you using your fingers as input devices has won for smartphones. The war is over. The idea of having "real" Windows on phones has lost. Its dead has been buried, decomposed and has been used to fertilize a small garden.

I never understood why people would want to run x86 on their mobile phone. The only reason I can think of would be to run x86 applications which are not possible to get on ARM (like Win32 apps). But even if you could do that they would be unusable on a device with a small screen without mouse and keyboard.

Linux applications too. Many packages aren't available in an ARM format (hell some packages aren't even available for some x86 distros) and not everyone is capable of compiling them themselves.

Maybe not so big a deal for a Smartphone, but probably a bigger deal for a tablet (where I might want a Gnome desktop with Dockey or Cairo... or XBMC).

The real beauty of Intel getting into the smart phone business is that they'll have a reference design that everyone can use. This will make smart phones more of a commodity item and drive prices down significantly.

How is Intel more of a commodity than ARM when it is more expensive and takes more chips?

Smart phones are already a commodity, it's just more expensive than you would like right now.

The biggest difference is that the N900 has a UI designed for that resolution. And the original EEE was not really a typical Windows machine. I would say that it was too small to run common applications.

Zeebee wrote:

Linux applications too. Many packages aren't available in an ARM format (hell some packages aren't even available for some x86 distros) and not everyone is capable of compiling them themselves.

I have seen GIMP running a mobile phone. It's not very usable when the palette of tools is larger than the screen.

Look at any successful mobile application and really LOOK at the interface. It is nowhere near as cluttered as a desktop application. Because it can't be! And mobile applications have very different use patterns as well. Typically you need applications to "hand off" between one another in a well defined manner (look at the Android framework for this, they clearly got this part right).

Actually, perhaps an different test for you to try if you're still not convinced is to take screenshots of your applications that you want to use and then view those on your mobile device.

It may seem like a good idea, but it's really not. If you want to run desktop apps on a mobile phone you HAVE to remake the UI to suit the environment. And if you can do that you might as well recompile it for a different architecture.

Apple didn't switch from PPC (an architecture) to Intel (a company), they switched architectures from PPC to x86. Intel just happens to be the best at x86. Intel was more interested in developing their x86 chips than IBM was in developing their PPC. As architectures, I think you'll find that PPC is very compelling, but if chips based on it are not being developed aggressively as a competitor architecture's chips, then you're stuck. Apple switched because it couldn't get any love from IBM.

I think that it was mostly because they couldn't get a decent (read: fast and power efficient) PPC mobile processor at the time. The desktop G5's performed pretty well, but they were being murdered performance-wise in the mobile space, which is were Apple sells most of its computers (they were still stuck with 1.6GHz G4s).

The real beauty of Intel getting into the smart phone business is that they'll have a reference design that everyone can use. This will make smart phones more of a commodity item and drive prices down significantly.

That's what the platform manufacturers have been doing for a long time.

When a company buys a mobile platform it has a lot of things already ready. It's really more like buying a laptop than separate computer parts. Typically there is software that goes with it as well, so you make applications on top of that.

It's really a shame that Intel don't concentrate on what they do best (fabbing) and just create a kick-ass ARM chip. Instead they seem intent on burning more money just as with their GPU effort. Of course they have to do something, otherwise they risk losing group on low end PC's as well in the future.

Do you need a microscope to use N900? Besides, if you don't see well, you can use a magnifier application. And it's not a problem to "hit the pinhead" with a stylus.

Does the N900 run "real" windows? I do not get the question. Running a UI designed for a small screen is not the problem. Even on high resolutions. Running a desktop OS like Windows on a 3.5" screen is the idiotic idea. Regardless of the resolution.

Oh and using a stylus on minuscule buttons etc. has worked really well for PDAs. Palm is positively thriving. And Windows Mobile 6 is thrashing the competition. </sarcasm>

It's all about the power consumption, and while Intel is ahead of everyone in process manufacturing, ARM is just superior in it's architecture. I expect this to remain the case for the foreseeable future. By the time Medfield comes out we will have 32nm ARM chips which will still beat it.

too bad netbooks continue to get no love. Seriously, my main notebook is an eee901 (Ubuntu). I ran the 701 but upgraded because of the built-in bluetooth (to make dealing with graphs on the go less painful) and bigger screen (Diablo II flipped out on the 701 and xmgrace's dialogs got confused). Aside from those two things, I'd probably still be on the 701. GIMP worked fine, as did OpenOffice, Inkscape (once they fixed the bug in the vertical toolbars, although that was a straightforward workaround). I do physics calculations on mine in addition to the above. I'm not gonna do a full 3D calculation of a quantum dot state on here, but it does just fine for wells and things.

The real beauty of Intel getting into the smart phone business is that they'll have a reference design that everyone can use. This will make smart phones more of a commodity item and drive prices down significantly.

That's what the platform manufacturers have been doing for a long time.

When a company buys a mobile platform it has a lot of things already ready. It's really more like buying a laptop than separate computer parts. Typically there is software that goes with it as well, so you make applications on top of that.

It's really a shame that Intel don't concentrate on what they do best (fabbing) and just create a kick-ass ARM chip. Instead they seem intent on burning more money just as with their GPU effort. Of course they have to do something, otherwise they risk losing group on low end PC's as well in the future.

I beg to differ. What Intel will do is let *anyone* use their design, not just themselves. Then you will have a choice of OS to put on it, be it Android, Meego, or whatever is made for the platform. That will drive down prices because nobody has to develop their own smart phone, they will just license/use the design.

I'm glad Intel did this, there really is no good reason why a decent smart phone should be in the $500 - $600 range.

This reminds me a bit of the XBox. Microsoft's first one wasn't a huge hit, but they stuck with it and made the XBox360, which has been highly successful. They saw gaming was a huge market they weren't in, and put their financial muscle behind it, staying in there and making v2.

Microsoft jumped at Sony's shadow thinking they were going to loose the home computer market to game consoles that were going to move up into the PC space at the same time missing the netbook market (Vista could not handle the hardware) and missing the smartphone market (Windows 7 Phone will hopefully be better). If Microsoft really is a good comparison then one needs to wonder what is Intel missing?

Further v2 of the xBox was a bit of a lemon as far as hardware design. One thing we can count on is that Intel will design much better v2 hardware then Microsoft.

1). iPhone still doesn't officially support 1080p so I'm unclear where you obtained these numbers other than your own testing with an unofficial app on a jailbroken phone, since that's the only way to force a true 1080p resolution on iPhone.

2). That said 1080p on a 3in screen is pointless because of the size. There is no visually apparent difference from 720p (probably even lower) to 1080p on a screen that size; the space on-screen just isn't there.

3). There is no magic in Narnia that would make ANY current iPhone get 10hrs of straight video playback, especially at that resolution, so I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit.

I think you guys need to let up on your Apple love just a bit (written on an iPod Touch).

It'll be interesting to see where Intel takes this....double the clock speed on the GMA600? Sounds like someone is designing a new mobile gaming platform...Android 360?

I beg to differ. What Intel will do is let *anyone* use their design, not just themselves. Then you will have a choice of OS to put on it, be it Android, Meego, or whatever is made for the platform. That will drive down prices because nobody has to develop their own smart phone, they will just license/use the design.

I'm glad Intel did this, there really is no good reason why a decent smart phone should be in the $500 - $600 range.

The CPU costs $15. Intel's contribution is not going to drive down the price of phones by making a $10 Atom CPU. In fact, the Atom might drive prices UP because the Intel solution uses so many more chips (5 instead of 2), with the CPU itself likely costing $25 all by itself. So tack on another $100 to any Moorestown powered phone. And thank Intel for $700 smartphones.